Kandy was heaving. Not because it was particularly busy, but because it heaves normally. The city, Sri Lanka’s original capital before the British replaced it with Colombo, is loudmouthed with horns – whether it is cars, trucks, buses, an ox-cart or a human being, you want to get out of the way. Cars are loud because they are old. Buses are louder, rickety affairs of nuts and no bolts which carry a crazy amount of human cargo.

There were, on top of everything else, the Buddhist chants echoing out of the Temple of the Tooth and covering the city with an aural smog. Me? I’ve managed to find the ‘Pub Restaurant’. Yes, a restaurant actually called Pub. I hog its Wi-Fi, which tussles with me some ten times to make me pay for it, then just gives up. I order $3 cocktails (that’s expensive, by the city’s standards) and line my mouth with spicy nuts. And I love it. I love the craziness of Kandy, Galle and every ‘city’ in Sri Lanka: they’re pure nostalgia for the world as it was two decades ago.

The Writer and I make our way down from Pub Restaurant, wavering a little as the alcohol is strong and true in our blood, and we walk through the crowds, past the man sitting on the pavement who charges 20 rupees [15c] for you to weigh yourself on his broken scales, past a limbless, yet strangely inoffensive, beggar, past the very odd shops selling Chinese tat and coconut oil straight out of a huge vat. We push our way to the Temple of the Tooth, where, at exactly 6.30pm, the drummers will start their daily ritual.

Just outside the temple, a man approaches us and, in perfect Italian says to TW, while looking him directly in the eyes “Si ricorda di me? Ero al vostro hotel la scorsa settimana.” TW shakes his head a little, smiles, and we walk on.

It is, of course, a scam. In cities, strangers – men mostly – will approach you and tell you they were ‘with you’ at your hotel. They tell you they’re the barman there, or a guest, or a receptionist. Unless you are right outside the hotel itself, ‘the hotel’ remains a vague, a nameless place to stay. We often wondered what their reaction would have been if we had just bothered to ask them which, exactly, this hotel was. As far as scams go, they’re of the innocent kind – even the scammers do their thing half-heartedly.

TW and I had been travelling all over the west and south coasts, the tea hills and the Yala jungle for almost eight days. In any other situation, upping sticks daily and moving on to yet another hotel, yet another atmosphere and ambience, would have been as crazy as riding a Sri Lankan bus. Yet, safely in the hands of Sri Lanka in Style, Royal Travel’s partners in Sri Lanka, we could pretend to be bohemian, yet know that we were constantly being taken care of. The trip looked arduous on paper: it wasn’t. Rather, it was a gentle eye-opener.

Every day, the landscape changed. Colombo airport is not in Colombo proper and after a few hundred metres of asphalt, we, together with our driver Maha and our ‘luxury car’ (which hilariously turned out to be a Toyota saloon) were already in the midst of the jungle. From the plane, Sri Lanka is a lush, dark green spot, and we had landed just as the sunrise was burning out. The road to our first four-postered abode, the wonderful Horathapola in Penalla, was a meander through miles of trees, bushes and shrubs punctuated by tiny villages where colourfully-dressed women in saris and men in sarongs haggled their way through their daily shopping.

By the third day on our tea hills trail, we were smitten. Later I told the people at Sri Lanka in Style that they must have booked us into Upper Glencairn Bungalow (which, bizarrely, belongs to the Bank of Ceylon) simply to show us the difference between cheap and ridiculously beautiful places to sleep. At Glencairn, our room may have cost just $40 a night but the bed was fashioned from a wooden mattress, a ‘pillow’ filled with foam discards, bits of rough cotton sheeting which came apart with the first toss and turn, and three million bed bugs. Beneath our room, a family sang their way through the evening. I was bitten all through the restless, sleepless night (although not by the singers) while TW, who can sleep through a hurricane, breathed softly next to me. Even though I had worn head-to-toe clothing, the next day my legs looked like they had been victimised by a very hungry rat and my back was stooped.

We could not wait to leave for Tea Trails, less than half an hour away. If we could run, we would have. There is no ‘mid-way’ kind of accommodation – it is either the horror of Glencairn or the honeymooners’ dream of Tea Trails. The tea plantations studded all over the hills – brighter than forest green – spread out before us. The drizzle came and went and so did the sun.

It is said that green is a restful colour as it sits in the middle of the spectrum, and within a few hours, our eyes and our brains had adjusted and settled. Malta, home, stress, work, and every single everyday niggle that tears away at our worried brains, had been discarded like rubbish. Wi-Fi was not a way to get news from home but something I used to post a picture on my Facebook profile every now and again, not to blag, but to share with my friends back home the alternate universe out there: a clean, fresh, green one, and it is available to everybody who can make the effort to hop on a plane and go.

Over the next days, we stayed in a different bungalow each night, travelling by car or meandering on foot by day. Our stop at Kahanda Kanda, where meeting the hilarious George Cooper, the owner, is a given, had us almost short of breath. KK was easily one of the most beautiful ‘houses’ we stayed at, with its Thai style, its location in a tea and coconut plantation just outside of Galle and its superb suites, all with their different styles and particular attention to detail.

Within no more than 48 hours, Sri Lanka had me in its grip. I was getting used to the reticence of the Sri Lankans themselves: they are a nation who, post hundreds of years of colonisation, which they vehemently tried to shrug off, are now adjusting to a world without 30 years of civil war. They do not smile easily, but when they do, their smile is the brightest light, a genuine, full-of-wonder grin which in turn, reflects on your face.

By day five, Sri Lanka had truly crept, quietly and insidiously, under my skin. I am a frequent traveller and I have been to as many corners of the world as I can handle. I have seen Thailand go from ‘the land of smiles’ to ‘the land of scammers’, China unfolding itself like a concrete lotus within months, and all of Europe becoming more and more homogenous with each passing day.

It is rare indeed that a country gets to me, and I usually have to spend days, months and sometimes years, trying to figure out why it has. South Africa did this four years ago: I simply wanted to move there. The people we met, including our driver Carmen Volkwyn (she now runs her own transport company) stayed with us, in our hearts and we now call them friends. They do the same with us. There is a simmering warmth that has remained – it cannot just have come from the stunning surroundings: most of it is down to the people themselves.

Years later, we felt this warmth we had felt in South Africa in the Sri Lankans. They are still not jaded by tourism, as, really and truly, they have only had it for the past year or so, at least in present quantities. TW and I, along with Maha, visited villages where they have never seen a foreigner before and it felt good to stand there, drinking water in an entire village where tea and coffee are simply not available to drink in a ‘bar’, but bizarrely, a disgusting malt-powder drink from Nestle is and so are the ubiquitous ‘posh’ lemon puff biscuits. Sometimes you go to countries where you know that ‘visiting the natives’ is on tourists’ agenda: the Masai Mara in Kenya is one of them, the Hill Tribes of Thailand, horrifically, another. Here, we were the natives; with every stop, it felt as if they were watching us, kindly, curiously yet discreetly.

There is a kind of simplicity to the Sri Lankan way that I envied enough to make me want to emigrate, and I do not say that lightly. Commercialisation, even in Colombo, is still way far from anything European, let alone American. ‘Shopping’ is like nothing available in the West: you need to hunt for items you want. Jane, who we met at the simply stunning Kandy House, where we spent our last night (post the Kandy Perahara Festival, we were literally alone with the staff) gave me the best hints and tips, and expressed what I had been feeling throughout: for the Sri Lankans, ‘value’ has a completely different meaning to that of westerners.

Sri Lanka does not have too many natural resources, except, of course, for its lush terrain and all that grows on it, but it is known for its manufacturing industry: its workers bring raw materials together into things for, mainly, western consumption.

And it is simply this consumption that started gnawing at me while I was there. When I wrote my shopping article, it was a cry for help: sometimes, things, just start to become ridiculous, a weight, rather than a pleasure. The Sri Lankans cannot understand how, for example, we pay more for a plain dress from, say, Karen Millen, and close to nothing for a dress full of buttons, or embroidery, or lace, from Primark.

For them, the latter involves more work, produced by themselves. In their city shops, where you sometimes find remainders from huge stock orders from the western high-street shops, they mark accordingly, and the Primark dress will cost more. They have not, as yet, understood the value of value-added. When I realised this, I also realised what ‘genuine’ meant, in all its facets. I wanted some of it, and for once, it cost absolutely zilch.

Poverty, I have always said, is relative. It is, I feel, a western concept. In India I took a photo of a very beautiful woman sitting and cooking on the ground in one of Chennai’s biggest slums. She looked serene. In the backstreets of Shanghai, the few still remaining, people were sitting on the ground, chatting and cooking, and not for one moment pining for things, objects, to stuff their ‘houses’ with. Some of their houses are smaller than my bathroom. To me, Shantarai (if you have time for its almost 1000 pages, read it to understand India) makes sense: I know why the author would want to spend almost two years living in the slums of Bombay where things are simply not important.

Sri Lanka brought all this together in my head. I yearned for a simple life, a life we were meandering through daily. Although I have no wish to join the slum dwellers in any city, simply because cities become more and more wearying with each passing year, a space next to one of their stunning lakes where I could simply cook, write and live, started to seem essential. Cynicism, backstabbing, envy, scrabbling for more money and power started to appear more and more ridiculous: a waste of this one life we get. Sri Lanka is mainly Buddhist and you can feel this not just when the chants cut through, quite madly and seemingly never-endingly, your late afternoon tea, but in the very air – clean, clear – that everyone breathes. I watched the western ‘investors’ swarm in, and I worried for its people. Don’t, I wanted to tell them, do what everybody else has done. The cost is just not worthwhile. Fifty percent of emigrants from Sri Lanka return, quite quickly, to their homeland: that, to me, says that they are an intelligent bunch.

Maybe that is why by the time we got to Sun House in Galle, a pretty colonial guest-house run by the wonderful Henri where the bar is a popular hangout for British ex-pats, it felt as if I had woken up from a long slumber. I looked at these very same ex-pats, with their rah-rahs and their yaahs, their gin tonics, their yoga mats and western, adapted-for-the-tropics clothing, their complaints about not having anywhere near enough wallahs as they had in India, and felt, not revulsion, not pity, but complete detachment. Henri stands out by a mile as the kind of woman who wanted to get away from this kind of social setting but ended up entertaining it. I wondered what the Sri Lankan staff thought of it all and felt it was probably the same as me. I had, by the end of it, become a little Sri Lankan myself.

It is said that travel changes your life, but I find that a little too extreme to handle. For frequent travellers, how many times can they actually change their life? They get back to the rat race, and the hamster wheel, and forget it all, revert to being little furry rodents themselves. Sri Lanka did, though, change the way I think, or possibly enforced my true nature.

If it takes sixteen hours of flying on a regular basis to get me back to that feeling, to suffuse my weary western eyes with genuine smiles, the red and yellow of the new cinnamon tree leaf or the tiny, hard bananas on the massive banana flower, the scramble of the Sri Lankan forests draping the hills, then I guess I’d better start saving up. And when I get tired of all that, of all this, when Europe and the Mediterranean finally weigh down a little too much, I know where I want to go.

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